Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Win One for JD Vance in Ohio
The author of Hillbilly Elegy earned a victory in a Senate primary that put Trump’s endorsement—and Thiel’s political aspirations—to the test.
Trump and Vance campaigning together in Delaware, Ohio.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On the surface, JD Vance does not cut a particularly convincing figure as a potential standard bearer of the American far right.
In 2016, Vance declined to vote for Donald Trump, his party’s nominee, and instead backed an independent, Evan McMullin, while presenting himself as a critic of Trump’s worst excesses. “I’m a ‘Never Trump guy,’” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, while promoting his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. “I never liked him.” He was even less circumspect in private: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” he told his old roommate from Yale Law School.